uld be destroyed in any other way.
Read them carefully, and draw your own conclusions; you will find some
notes of mine in the little red pocket-book_."

The architect had read these words many times. They were no doubt the
outcome of the delusions of which Mr Sharnall had more than once
spoken--of that dread of some enemy pursuing him, which had darkened the
organist's latter days. Yet to read these things set out in black and
white, after what had happened, might well give rise to curious
thoughts. The coincidence was so strange, so terribly strange. A man
following with a hammer--that had been the organist's hallucination; the
vision of an assailant creeping up behind, and doing him to death with
an awful, stealthy blow. And the reality--an end sudden and unexpected,
a blow on the back of the head, which had been caused by a heavy fall.
Was it mere coincidence, was it some inexplicable presentiment, or was
it more than either? Had there, in fact, existed a reason why the
organist should think that someone had a grudge against him, that he was
likely to be attacked? Had some dreadful scene been really enacted in
the loneliness of the great church that night? Had the organist been
taken unawares, or heard some movement in the silence, and, turning
round, found himself alone with his murderer? And if a murderer, whose
was the face into which the victim looked? And as Westray thought he
shuddered; it seemed it might have been no human face at all, but some
fearful presence, some visible presentment of the evil that walketh in
darkness.

Then the architect would brush such follies away like cobwebs, and,
turning back, consider who could have found his interest in such a deed.
Against whom did the dead man urge him to be on guard lest Martin's
papers should be spirited away? Was there some other claimant of that
ill-omened peerage of whom he knew nothing, or was it--And Westray
resolutely quenched the thought that had risen a hundred times before
his mind, and cast it aside as a malign and baseless suspicion.

If there was any clue it must lie in those same papers, and he followed
the instruction given him, and took them to his own room. He did not
show Miss Joliffe the note; to do so could only have shaken her further,
and she had felt the shock too severely already. He only told her of
Mr Sharnall's wishes for the temporary disposal of her brother's
papers. She begged him not to take them.

"Dear Mr Wes